Bill Wallace died out loud for all to see, spending his final days the way he lived them as the investigative news reporter and crime novelist he was for four decades. In your face, blunt. Honest.

During the past 16 months as he battled cancer, Mr. Wallace posted regular updates of his fight on Facebook, documenting the medications he was taking, the pains of his body as it shut down — and always, his unwavering determination to go down swinging.

“Wow! I was kicking ass today! Got 10,000 words of rewrite and revisions done for my new anthology,” he posted on Feb. 6. Three days later he wrote, “Life remains better than I could have hoped.” Hundreds of people typed encouragement in reply, month after month, calling him everything from an inspiration to a “bona-fide badass.”

The last posting Mr. Wallace made, two weeks before he died at his Berkeley home on Saturday, was a self-shot video of him quietly playing slide guitar. He turned off the camera at the end with a slight smile, as if saying goodbye. He was 69 years old.

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It was all the kind of exit that Mr. Wallace’s co-workers and journalism students expected of a man who spent his 26-year career at The Chronicle writing exhaustively researched stories challenging authorities of all kinds, from the state Legislature to the police.

“That was Bill — he was flinty,” said his longtime partner on investigative projects, former Chronicle reporter Susan Sward. “His attitude was, ‘I’m a tough guy and I’m not afraid of it.’ It was impressive.”

Mr. Wallace brought that puncher’s sensibility to virtually every story he wrote until he retired from the newspaper in 2006, whether it was in a series he wrote that year with Sward, Elizabeth Fernandez and Seth Rosenfeld about police violence, a 1999 exploration of the plight of domestic violence victims, or investigations into missteps by government that contributed to the 1991 Oakland hills fire.

Mr. Wallace was also one of the paper’s main “rewrite” reporters, those who take notes from reporters in the field on a breaking story, do their own research and pound out a story — all on a tight deadline. Rewrite is a tough task in any newsroom, and Mr. Wallace was as renowned at The Chronicle for his specialty at that as he was for his investigations.

“He was the greatest night rewrite man I ever met,” said former Chronicle Managing Editor Jerry Roberts. “Fast, clean, could bat out five or six stories a night, whatever it took. He was also the toughest reporter I knew, and the most meticulous.”

Mr. Wallace was born in Placerville (El Dorado County) to Mary and Ernest “Tub” Wallace. The family lived in a trailer that moved with them all over Northern California and Colorado as “Tub” worked construction jobs, eventually settling back in Placerville, where Mr. Wallace went to El Dorado High School.

A voracious reader of everything from science fiction to Steinbeck, Mr. Wallace drummed in a rock band and graduated a year early in 1965, but not before meeting his classmate and future bride, Margot Bliss. They married in 1967, the same year Mr. Wallace enlisted in the Navy and became an intelligence specialist. He received an honorable discharge in 1971.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from UC Berkeley in 1973, then wrote articles for the Daily Californian, Washington Post, Nation magazine, Berkeley Barb and National Enquirer before taking a job with Roberts at the Bay Guardian in the mid-1970s. The two led a fierce but unsuccessful attempt to unionize the Guardian, and soon afterward both wound up working at The Chronicle.

“He just loved doing the work of journalism, and guess what? It was pretty great finally getting a decent paycheck at The Chronicle after all those years,” said Margot Wallace, who remained married to Mr. Wallace for the rest of his life.

His zeal for unionism — fueled, his friends say, at least partly by his humble roots — led him to be president of the local unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild during the 1994 strike by workers at The Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner.

“Bill was a real advocate of working people, a classic investigative reporter who had a very fast trigger on injustice,” said Carl Hall, executive officer of the guild. “He was never bashful about speaking his piece.”

After retiring, Mr. Wallace taught journalism at California State University East Bay and began writing hard-boiled noir crime novels and short stories under the name William E. Wallace. He pumped out seven books with titles including “Dead Heat With the Reaper” — a pair of tales about a “badass” who is dying and a horribly scarred war veteran — and was working on another when he died.

The writing was pithy and direct, just as he was in person to the end. A few months before his death, a reporter ran into Mr. Wallace on a Berkeley street and asked how he was doing.

“I’m dying,” he said, eyes hard and bright. “But I’ve got a lot of writing to do before I go. I’m not going away easy.”

Mr. Wallace is survived by his wife of 49 years and his son, Garth Wallace of Berkeley. No services are planned.